Settlement In Northern Ireland Research Articles

Vanity of the Bonfires? Eleventh Night Bonfires and Loyalist Influence After Negotiated Settlement in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT Cultural events can mask latent potential for a resurgence of violence following negotiated settlement, building sectarian identities and support through otherwise-legitimate forms of expression. This article examines this phenomenon in Northern Ireland, investigating how Loyalists utilize Eleventh Night bonfires. It is argued that, in becoming more professional in construction and more sectarian in imagery, bonfires build and maintain paramilitary power, generate political capital within Unionism, and reinforce boundaries between groups. Bonfires are a key part of the culture war which has developed in Northern Ireland, raising vital questions about the role of culture following negotiated settlement in deeply-divided societies more broadly.

Peat Uncovers a Uniquely Resilient Irish Community

Researchers reveal an abandoned settlement in Northern Ireland that showed unusual resilience during calamities including epidemics, famine, and climate change.

Reviews: Negotiating a settlement in Northern Ireland, 1969–2019

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Brexit and the Irish Border

The Irish border proved one of the most difficult issues in the negotiations on the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. A persistent point of contention since the partition of Ireland a hundred years ago, it had been put into abeyance by a combination of the historic Common Travel Area, the peace settlement in Northern Ireland and the EU Single Market, which had allowed the disappearance of physical structures. The final agreement leaves important areas of ambiguity but does represent a breach in the UK’s vision of Brexit and a single settlement for the whole of the United Kingdom. It represents the first time that the EU has permitted partial integration in the EU for a region of a non-Member State but the circumstances are such that it does not provide a precedent.

Negotiating a Settlement in Northern Ireland, 1969-2019: From Sunningdale to St Andrews by John Coakley Jennifer Todd (review)

Negotiating a Settlement in Northern Ireland, 1969–2019: From Sunningdale to St Andrews, John Coakley and Jennifer Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 624 pages. ‘This is about principled compromise, not compromised principles’ (John Hume) What is commonly referred to as the Northern Ireland problem has a triple aspect. It comprises the relationship between the unionist and nationalist communities within the North, the relationship between the unionist minority and the nationalist majority on the island of Ireland and the relationships between the institutionalised political entities and communities in Ireland and those on the mainland of the United Kingdom. Each of these links has the capacity to affect the others and, in the past, has often done so in a negative way. Of the three sets of connections, there is little doubt that the most important one, the prime cause, the dynamic which impacts most strongly for better or worse on the other two, is the interaction between the two traditions within Northern Ireland; there the problem is most acute, there the seeds of a resolution must be sought as a priority. Yes, the totality of relations is basic, yes, all aspects of the interlocking difficulties must be tackled together, but without some grounds for positive developments in the North, the other relationships are likely to remain fraught. To say this is not new, it is description rather than analysis; was it Hugh Munro who said years ago, ‘If Northern Ireland worked, there would be no need for Northern Ireland’? The present workmanlike and thorough study is presented by two academic researchers with a proven track record in the Department of Politics at UCD and within the Institute for British–Irish Studies. John Coakley is now Professor at Queen’s University Belfast and Jennifer Todd is Professor Emerita at UCD. This volume will undoubtedly become a standard work of reference for future students of the Troubles. It is not a short read. It includes a selection of basic documents, 25 in all; a 12-page bibliography with over 250 other books and studies listed; and at its core, edited extracts from witness seminars and interviews with some of the politicians (9) and senior civil servants (18), from Dublin, London and Northern Ireland, who participated in the discussions and negotiations over the period. This is only one part of the story; a conscious decision was taken not to focus specifically Studies • volume 109 • number 434 217 Review Articles on relations between the more militant parties and the governments. The central section is divided into five chapters dealing in chronological order with Sunningdale, the 1985 Agreement, the Downing Street Declaration and Framework Documents, negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement and, finally, the partial implementation of that agreement. The book is handsomely produced; the understated jacket image, showing the subtle differences and similarities of le Brocquy’s 1973 Cuchulainn I tapestry complements its major themes nicely. Given its format, I would have welcomed a more detailed and substantial discussion of the scope, value and limitations of oral history. The subject is fashionable, and it is already being debated with specific reference to Northern Ireland in the case of the Boston tapes. It is dealt with in summary fashion on pages 25–26 of the introduction, where the issues, inter alia, of reliability, selection bias and gender imbalance in relation to this study are treated competently, but in broad outline only. The wide range of topics and the large number of participants (65 in the first tranche of interviews and 88 in the second, with more taking part in 6 witness seminars) provide reasonable guarantees but the ‘view from within’, combined with the ever-present temptations towards arcana imperii, require an extra-critical approach which should be fully explained. The use of language At the risk of appearing curmudgeonly, I would also question an over-casual use of language. I admit that the modern usage of ‘differential’as an adjective annoys me; but the words ‘republican’ and, especially, ‘peace’ present more basic problems in relation to Northern Ireland. Republican: it may now be too late to reverse the almost universal practice of commentators and politicians in Ireland, North and South, and in Britain of using...

Irish Politics Since the Crash, 2008–2016

The Great Recession has had a far-reaching and profound impact on Irish political life. In the Republic of Ireland, there have been greater shifts at the ballot box since the crisis began than over the previous five decades, and a combative movement against water charges has threatened the state’s image as the poster child for Euro-austerity. Meanwhile, the postwar settlement in Northern Ireland faces its most severe challenge yet, as drastic cuts in public spending imposed by Britain’s Conservative government put the local power-sharing administration under intense strain. This essay will address the main developments in Irish politics, north and south, since the recession began, and identify some of the key factors that will determine the future of political struggle on the island.

The Belfast-Good Friday Agreement, Brexit, and Rights

This paper considers the relationship between the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement, which underpins the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, and Brexit. In particular, the paper examines the implications of Brexit for rights under the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement. The paper details the problems Brexit poses for rights in Northern Ireland, and the contrasting positions adopted in the Article 50 negotiations by the EU-27 and the UK. Finally, the paper considers the UK Withdrawal Bill, and the effects of the Bill on the devolution arrangements in Northern Ireland.

Brexit and the British Bill of Rights

On 27 October 2016 Edinburgh Law School, the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, the Global Justice Academy, the Human Rights Centre, and the Edinburgh Europa Institute came together at Edinburgh Law School to discuss two inter-connected developments of profound significance for the constitutional order of the United Kingdom: Brexit and a British Bill of Rights. Although the discussion ranged widely, human rights protection, and the prospect of regression in existing rights protection, was the primary focus. This research paper reflects the discussions at the workshop on the nature of these developments, and the possible implications of each development for the United Kingdom across a range of dimensions: the devolution settlements, the peace settlement in Northern Ireland based on the Good Friday Agreement, parliamentary supremacy, the UK’s relationship with the European Union, and the UK’s international obligations beyond the EU’s legal order. It is grouped around four key themes: • Concrete reduction in rights protection; • Consent; • Constitutional complexity; and • Community.

The Implications of the Good Friday Agreement for UK Human-Rights Reform

Speculation is rife as to the impact of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement upon the Conservative Government’s plans to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998. In the face of this speculation, the UK’s Conservative Government has provided little detail as to how UK human-rights reform will address the requirement for incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Northern Ireland settlement. We therefore analyse the Agreement as both an international treaty and peace agreement and evaluate its interrelationship with the Human Rights Act and the Northern Ireland Act. Once the hyperbole surrounding the Agreement and its attendant domestic legislation is stripped away, the effects of the 1998 settlement are in some regards more extensive than has to date been recognised, but in other respects are less far-reaching than some of the Human Rights Act’s supporters claim. The picture that emerges from our analysis is of an intricately woven constitution dependent on devolution arrangements, peace agreements, and international relationships.

Under Which Constitutional Arrangement Would You Still Prefer to be Unemployed? Neoliberalism, the Peace Process, and the Politics of Class in Northern Ireland

This article seeks to critically examine the political economy of the Northern Irish “peace process.” When the principal paramilitary organizations in the region declared cease-fires in 1994, it was widely assumed that political progress would be followed by economic prosperity. However, this “peace dividend” has never fully materialized. Those working-class communities that were at the center of the Troubles have derived little economic benefit over the last two decades. Indeed, if anything the already substantial class divisions in the six counties have become more pronounced over the course of the peace process. The article concludes by suggesting that these widening socioeconomic disparities have the potential to undermine the prevailing political settlement in Northern Ireland.

Transforming Power Relationships: Leadership, Risk, and Hope

Chronic communal conflicts often embody prisoner's dilemmas. Both communities prefer peace to war. Yet neither trusts the other, viewing the other's gain as its loss, so potentially shared interests often go unrealized. Achieving positive-sum outcomes from apparently zero-sum struggles requires a particular kind of risk-embracing leadership. To succeed leaders must (a) see power relations as potentially positive-sum, (b) strengthen negotiating adversaries when tempted to weaken them, and (c) demonstrate hope for a positive future and take great personal risks to achieve it. Such leadership is exemplified by Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk in the South African democratic transition. To illuminate the strategic dilemmas Mandela and de Klerk faced, we examine the work of Robert Axelrod, Thomas Schelling, and Josep Colomer, who highlight important dimensions of the problem but underplay the role of risk-embracing leadership. Finally we discuss leadership successes and failures in the Northern Ireland settlement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Breaking Patterns of Conflict in Northern Ireland: New Perspectives

Central to reaching peace and settlement in Northern Ireland was a sequence of British--Irish intergovernmental discussions and negotiations, dating from the beginning of the 1980s. British and Irish state cooperation and intervention has remained central to the stability of the settlement reached in 1998. The motives of state actors, however, have been unclear, and the role of the state in the political process has been the subject of some scholarly controversy. This paper looks at the types of evidence that can help to resolve such questions. It focuses on the value of elite interviews, arguing that they can constitute an important and irreplaceable body of evidence when used critically, but it also highlights the risks of excessive reliance on this type of source. It goes on to describe a major research project in University College Dublin whose aim was to record the experiences and interpretations of the actors who engaged in British–Irish negotiations over the last four decades. It discusses the resulting elite interviews and witness seminars and the methodological and ethical difficulties encountered. It describes how these were overcome, and outlines the conditions of confidentiality imposed.

History, Structure and Action in the Settlement of Complex Conflicts: The Northern Ireland Case

This article argues for a historical-structural approach to explaining conflict and settlement. It argues that the manner in which institutions function and actors pursue their ends is in part determined by slow-moving interlinked structural relationships whose logic, trajectory and effects can only be identified historically. In complex conflicts such structural configurations generate tendencies to conflict and settlement requires that they be weakened. The article elaborates this model to account for settlement in Northern Ireland. It argues that what made the difference between relative success in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and earlier failures was not short-term actor-oriented mechanisms, or even a lessening of structural inequality alone, but change in a deeper structural configuration, triggered by a change in the role of the British state. The article traces how this was taken forward, and explains why tensions continue. It contributes to debates on the role of political agency and structural constraint in complex conflicts.

A Life Course Perspective on Urban–Rural Migration: the Importance of the Local Context

ABSTRACTThe relationship between migration and age has long been established, and most recently, there have been calls for the inclusion of a life course perspective to migration research. In this paper, we explore Northern Ireland's internal migration patterns, and in particular, we test for the importance of urban to rural migration at different stages of the life course. Data from the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study are used for the first time to analyse urban–rural migration patterns. The resulting modelling demonstrates unique aspects of urban to rural migration within Northern Ireland, which up until now have gone largely unreported.Results from logistic regression modelling suggest that there is an age selectivity to urban–rural mobility but not necessarily at the life course stages predicted from a review of the life course migration literature. Individuals in younger age groups (at the household and family formation stages of the life course) are most likely to make an urban to rural move in Northern Ireland, with a decline in the likelihood of this move type with age. Possible explanations are offered linked to Northern Ireland's settlement hierarchy, rural planning policy, and family farming traditions. The findings challenge researchers to pay due attention to how migration processes may play out differently in varying geographical, social, and planning contexts and emphasise the importance of structural factors to explain migration patterns. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Ethnic Groups at ‘Critical Junctures’: The Laz vs. Kurds

The Turkish Republic emerged onto the world stage as a secular and centralized nation state in the early 1920s from the remnants of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual Ottoman Empir...

Path Dependence in Settlement Processes: Explaining Settlement in Northern Ireland

The recent literature on path dependence provides a model that can be used in explanation of ethnic conflict and settlement processes. Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this article identifies path dependent patterns of conflict embedded in long-term processes of political development whose change may interrupt these patterns. It highlights the importance of long-term state trajectories in constituting and reproducing these patterns, the generation of ‘endogenous’ processes of change and the impact of wider geopolitical processes in strengthening these. It shows how and why factors such as power, perception, networks and institutions vary in their impact on conflict and explains when they work together to produce settlement.

Reiterating National Identities

The Haagerup Report commissioned by the European Parliament in 1984 was the first major initiative taken by the European Union (EU) on the situation of conflict in Northern Ireland. It embodied a conceptualization of the conflict as between two national identities defined in relation to the Irish border. The EU's self-ascribed role towards a settlement in Northern Ireland since that time has followed this vein by supporting the peaceful expression of British and Irish identities rather than reconstructing them or creating alternatives. This nation-based approach is encapsulated in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between the governments of the UK and Ireland and political parties in Northern Ireland. Through detailed analysis of the Haagerup Report in the light of the peace process in Northern Ireland as a whole, this article assesses the implications of conceptualizing Northern Ireland as a clash of national identities for resolution of the conflict and argues for a subsequent reconsideration of the EU's role in conflict resolution.

Truth, partial truth, and irreconcilable truths: Reflections on the prospects for truth recovery in Northern Ireland

The issues facing truth recovery work in Northern Ireland arise in the context of a peace process in which there has been no clear winner, where several key issues, such as policing and criminal justice remain unresolved, and where there is a lack of trust between the parties to the conflict. Yet there is a demand for processes that have the potential to uncover the truth about unresolved killings and disappearances. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is often cited in Northern Ireland as a model for truth recovery processes, in spite of its shortcomings and the contextual differences between South Africa and Northern Ireland. While there remains a demand for truth about human rights violations and contested killings, the compromised nature of the Northern Ireland settlement and the culture of silence that prevails within Northern Ireland institutions are obstacles to the progress of truth recovery work there. Nor is Northern Ireland ready for the rewriting of its history, although some argue that truth recovery work could provide an important disincentive to those who would return to violence. The assumption that truth recovery is always a prerequisite for healing is challenged, and painful effects of truth processes in reopening the wounds of the past are pointed out. Yet the role of truth recovery in improving public awareness of the wrongs of the past, and in providing new opportunities for forgiveness and reconciliation is acknowledged. However, truth recovery can inadvertently reinforce a dis‐empowered and unhealthy “victim culture” and may also prejudice future judicial processes. The paper concludes by summarizing the recommendations for truth recovery in Northern Ireland of the Healing Through Remembering Project. They suggest that a range of mechanisms, including some community‐based self‐help processes, are the preferred paths for this work in Northern Ireland.

Social exclusion, equality and the Good Friday Peace Agreement: the implications for land use planning

English The Good Friday Peace Agreement has attempted to establish a constitutional settlement in Northern Ireland by trying to address the long-term causes of conflict in the region. While it primarily deals with the region’s relationship to Britain and the Republic of Ireland, it also includes measures that tackle social exclusion and discrimination in policy making. The article examines the impact of these on land use planning in the region, which has traditionally adopted a centralised, technocratic approach to policy making that denied the realities of sectarian division. The new policy agenda directly challenges this style of planning and has included a number of initiatives that could partially open the planning system to public scrutiny and force it to incorporate issues of social justice. This article describes the partial success in implementing these measures and makes an interim assessment of their potential impact and broader policy relevance.

Democracy, Governance and Governmentality: Civic Public Space and Constitutional Renewal in Northern Ireland

This article seeks to make some general points about the changing nature of constitutionalism by looking critically at the constitutional architecture of the Northern Ireland Act 1998. It argues that despite their sophistication the structures of settlement in Northern Ireland do not address fully the fundamental issues of the changing nature of power and the ethical character of constitutional transformation. The argument draws upon the governmentality approach associated with work developing the later writings of Michel Foucault to consider the nature of government and of multi‐level and multi‐form governance. In particular, the account reviews briefly the settlement structures and suggests that the role of government may have changed since last there was devolution in Northern Ireland. Next the history of involvement of the voluntary sector in governance in the Northern Ireland context is outlined to indicate its particular potential for development. Finally, the positive advantages of opening up a new democratic space through developing the role of civil society in the processes of governance are reviewed and the value of a constitutional renewal project is considered.